In order to preserve power resources and lower overhead usage, conventional physical CPUs utilize memory monitoring instructions (e.g., monitor and mwait instructions) designating a range of memory that allow the physical CPU to stop instruction execution. The physical CPU executing the monitoring instruction is blocked from further execution and enters a wait state until there is a change to the designated memory by another physical CPU or an inter-processor interrupt is received.
However, in virtualized computing systems, if a virtual machine attempts to write to the designated memory block in order to wake-up the physical CPU executing memory monitoring instructions, a virtual machine exit is performed which causes a transition of control from the virtual machine to the software layer providing the virtualization, commonly referred to as a hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM)).